the heart a hollow plane
by cordialcount
Summary: Snow adapts the corruption Ravenna implanted into vices befitting a queen. (Ravenna/Snow White; contains consent issues.)


She can see filth on the brat's teeth as she spits out the apple. It matches the rest of her attire, but that glimpse strains Ravenna more than the visual affront presented by Snow White's impression of living in a pigpen. One of the women cooped up nearby had chewed worms as her aging-day approached. Snow is not of her class. Her eyes shine, despite the decrepit air Ravenna encourages in her rooms for the pleasure of knowing where the castle's one required room of squalor lies—for the familiar ache of returning to somewhere as deprived as her own childhood. Snow has probably tried to knock bricks out of the fireplace and stuck her fingers in her mouth to hide the evidence. She is an appalling, tenacious brat.

Habits set early. Magnus had at least taught her politeness. "You should not spit at your queen," Ravenna says. She watches Snow's gaze shift. Admit open rebellion or unladylike behavior? She enjoys questions where she might receive either response. _Yes, my Queen_ is soothing but becomes, like a fair headpiece worn too often, something to which she is accustomed. Only the deliberate act of submission makes her feel alive again.

"It is a mealy apple," says Snow, and that is a third answer. Ah, her surprises are vital to Ravenna's health.

"Men starve outside. Look at you."

"Please save them," says Snow, and squirms off her lap under the pretense of modest withdrawal. "You can have this land flower again, if you would only wish it."

But she expects that from Snow, that fastidious heart of hers, that impulse to put being a king's daughter above her own gaunt ribs. Ravenna wraps her arms around the standing Snow's waist, then slides them to her shoulders. Her breaths are audible as she skims over one breast, as she traps Snow's elbows against her sides—louder and sweeter than the sound of her soldiers riding out for new maidens as she circles Snow's soft throat. "You would question my decisions?"

Snow jerks her arm up and shakes her way out of the caress Ravenna is easing into a choke hold. A pity. Petechiae contrast very well on her skin, with her war-narrowed, bruised eyes drawn aesthetic in the extreme, the kind of frailty that in her face looks delectable rather than a disfiguration. It compels an awareness of Snow as more than a meal. As someone who would be desired for long use, as Ravenna once was; as someone who heats the muscles of Ravenna's legs as she imagines clamping the girl between them. It would be a better prison than this cell, she thinks. I should tell you stories whilst you sleep.

"Am I not kind to you?"

"No," says Snow, reflexively.

"How can I be kinder to you, then? More fruit?" Not suggesting other favors hurts. She pulls her blade back out of her robes. Not that Snow has grown too weak to bite her food herself, but recognition that Ravenna draws the dagger that killed her father pales Snow further. The light creeps slow as dust over her quivering hands, etches them fantastical, cloaked, displaces through time to a bonfire and a final rattle until she catches herself and cups the sunbeam in her palms. The control in Snow when she is furious and impotent can cut Ravenna just by watching.

She adds a long spiral of peel to the other detritus of eight years' imprisonment. Snow looks at the dagger snicking and gliding, and away, as though to save herself from temptation, but if Ravenna has taught her anything it is to desire and wield weapons. A twist of rope, a frugal shiver of glass, her warm and uninviting body. The short game: to teach her to see blades as agents of opportunity. Seize them and survive. The long game: to take pure, innocent, beautiful Snow White and dispossess her of her purity and innocence—to corrupt what should not be corrupted, for some piece of Ravenna thinks it impossible that in a world she has worked to such terrors, Snow should take the bald apple so demurely and eat it, and not admit to fear at all.

"I'd love to go outside," Snow says. That too is ritual.

Ravenna smoothens her hair back for her. Have this promise from me, she thinks; I will care for you to the last of your beauty.

It is summer. The apple had been traded for with lutestring. The sun ventures to brighten Ravenna; she straightens her robe's neck, which she refuses to call a collar—too many phantoms of those fetter her. The power to own things is the power to name them. They are not Queen Ravenna tête-à-tête with Queen Snow to be. Inheritance is a matter for those without magic. She is Queen, first and only, and for all that Snow's chest must burn to hang her she thinks herself Magnus' princess. Named and property.

But Ravenna has _whims_, like the occasional girl tied in her bed, bonds intricate as silver work, teeth white and a-chatter. Sometimes she wants Snow's power to soar in her corruption's wake. Queen the Second. It is no more than the raiders demanded from her as vengeance.

* * *

Snow in the forest: her work's done for her, Ravenna thinks. If the trolls don't gut her first, the human predators on the forest's edge will tenderize her. Ravenna's knees itch without sympathy.

She has her throne moved to align the courtyard in the sights of the hall windows, but nothing changes. The soldiers form arrays and fracture with perfect predictability. A sword drops, a man is beaten, the art of subjugation continues untested. Finn comes and tries to touch her shoulder, but she cranes her neck and obsidian hatches from the ceiling to stab him in the wrist. Even the slight resistance of his body to her healing is a provocation that renews her. A decade ago harriers would cry to each other in the dusk, but five ounces of sickened rat are no longer sufficient to wheel them about the parapets. Evening comes on without them.

Her food bores her, but executing a chef is no cure. It is the quality of these women that starves her, not the preparation. They huddle doe-eyed as ever and her hair still feigns gold enough to blind them. She feels like the keys to her head have been lost in a well, there but unreachably deep.

She contemplates letting age soften her, but this wretched land needs a queen.

* * *

Snow on the mirror's steps:

Snow can't give up her heart, but something thin and belated flickers across her face. Ravenna is proud enough to think that Snow considered it, that Snow is so infernally giving she thought of restoring her queen with her heart. Perhaps for a moment as slim as the film of sweat on her cheeks she looks at Ravenna slumped beside the mirror and regrets. The knowledge that Ravenna has always been more powerful is writ across Snow's brow. I would turn that power to good if you let me live, Ravenna tries to say.

But Snow says _You can't_, and lying is simple with kings but for this girl she could have killed any day of the last decade, silence settles on her like pond ice. Snow tears up at her, sorrowed and not apologizing at all. Her tears affect some strange transference in Ravenna. Her youth continues slewing off her face, but Snow drops her eyes and Ravenna's veins might carry water for the speed they flow under her wrinkling skin.

She understands three propositions:

Snow is not quite special, in and of her newly lanky and dirt-disposed self. Ravenna placed her in extraordinary circumstances. The beats of a heart determine its longevity, not how it tastes breathed into the stomach.

From these, Snow makes Ravenna's heart leap like it's found Judas. She never touched her in the tower. Snow's lips are hushed, and Ravenna does not intend to let herself die wanting, so when Snow hitches her knee back and puts one hand forth to support her armor's weight as she stands, Ravenna grabs her wrist. She is a woman contemplating a cliff; her assailant must fall with her. "Keep kneeling," she says. "You were perfect."

"No," says Snow, reflexively.

Ravenna's first weapons were against her admirers—admirers who were also her enemies, wanting more than she wanted to give. And she admires her enemies, she learns from them, she sleeps by them and steals their things and repurposes them. The wolves always ringing the castle doors have left her clawed, although they fight with flesh and cartilage and she foils with magic and steel. She reaches into the mottled light with her thumb-claw for Snow. "Think of it," she says, placing the point to Snow's neck, "as a last meal for a prisoner. How can you deny me that much? Death wishes are powerful."

Snow stills. "You can't take my heart."

"Not like that," Ravenna says, withdrawing the tiny cold blade. Its purpose has been served. "Something physical will do. You're a kind woman. Think of the consequences. Do you wish me to create rancor as I die?" She waves vaguely. The direction matters not. Tabor is all about them, and Snow feels the yoke of her responsibility to it acutely as Ravenna never will. "You're their purity, Snow White, this land flowers on your ability to be _kind_."

"I don't have to be kind to _you_," says Snow. "I've earned that much."

Ravenna rolls over so she can hide her crow's eyes against the ground and laughs. "Do you think you can draw power from being cruel to me? By fairest blood, Snow, be fair. It's easy to be kind to sweet hurt chicks. Being kind to ravens is true sacrifice."

"Sacrifice," Snow repeats, her fingers limp and soft under Ravenna's palm. "Sacrifice."

I won't be the last to ask it of you, Ravenna thinks. "It's all right," she says. The lecture has taken years out of her—it's her own fault Snow can act so ignorant, but nonetheless she is old and frustrated and the curl of Snow's tongue around _sacrifice_ makes her mouth go weak. "One last thing."

The smoke haloes Snow's flyaway hairs as though she's been silhouetted and projected onto a long wall, and the air is dense with candlelight. She has always been a giantess in Ravenna's thoughts compared to the real Snow, who tentatively inches closer and gives Ravenna's dress hem a dry kiss. Ravenna feels a faint warmth stir on her leg beneath the ring of Snow's lips. "Very good," she says, and Snow tries again with more force while Ravenna clasps her neck and finds the top knob of Snow's spine. She's so thin the bone feels like a sprout about to push through the earth's surface, but again, Ravenna's own deprivations did that to her. Now Snow will build something else from the remains.

Snow plucks aside the feather-shafts that hide Ravenna's chest. She's not smiling, but her face has an edge sharp enough to be hope. It's only a few inches upward to drive her fingers home behind Snow's ears, to cut short Snow's cry by taking her in hand and kissing her. Snow's nails are curious, dirty things scrabbling at her breasts as she gasps inward. Then she meets Ravenna, tongue and teeth and tongue, and Ravenna's heart runs like a forge's bellows at Snow biting down.

"I've dreamed of you," Ravenna says, "stupid, ridiculous dreams," but the night's theme appears to be the reduction of the absurd; Snow relents and fulfills them all. The one where time is an avalanche, and one moment she's shrouded in jet and the next Snow rips her dress from throat to navel to cunt, where Ravenna has left some threads halfway to undoing against the hope that anyone would ever do this to her again. Snow rests her head on Ravenna's belly and draws a deep breath through her nostrils, and her chin comfortably bumps a drumbeat on Ravenna's skin as she laughs and laughs. Ignorant Snow, not certain what to do, but she knows to enjoy the musk and ash Ravenna has applied without the thought anyone would come close enough to taste it. Ravenna grasps her waist, drags her up. Her protruding hipbones become useful as Ravenna matches the hollow above her own curls to one shoaling curve.

The one where time is a tale, and the tale should never end. Snow glances up, an aphrodisiac in her anxiety. Ravenna pushes her head down to where she ought to be looking at her hardening nipple. Snow's education ought to be complete in matters of the body, but the hint doesn't resolve for her until Ravenna flicks her finger over her other nipple—and she's dreaming, it's no effort for her to tighten—and cinches her thumb and index down, squeezing it until Snow's eyes go wide merely at the sight of it. "Try," Ravenna says. Snow licks. Her tongue bends around the curves of Ravenna's breasts so carefully that Ravenna overheats for a moment, stops directing her, drops back into real space seconds later to find Snow still in assiduous practice. Everything worth doing, worth doing well, including the swollen pink of Snow's lips gentle on her nipple, easy to picture elsewhere. She half-watches Snow suck on her until her nerves from breasts to thighs are like a road oft-taken. Her cunt is very wet.

The one where waking is better, for the pleasure of saying _use your fingers_ when Snow has begun kissing downward and her desperation overrides her naivety. Of course she misunderstands and tries to stroke Ravenna's thighs, thighs no longer a smooth arch, and Ravenna wonders whether she traces letters of desire or shame—Snow's braid swings before her forehead, so Ravenna tugs off the tie and feels something obscene surface at Snow's hair parting to hide her entirely, like the sea. Perhaps it's the language everyone speaks in bed, the one where there are words right for having a kiss placed a half-inch above your clit and your stepdaughter's cheeks smeared with your fluids. "Your tongue," Ravenna says. Snow is clumsy and the circle she licks unsteady but _she is doing it_. For all the hell Ravenna has wreaked, she cannot make Snow do this again.

Snow's tongue flicks short and overlapping over her folds, thrusts shallow as oars. It's probably her inexperience, but Ravenna has long survived on tailoring herself to her situation, and when she grinds against Snow's mouth her tongue slips unbearably deep and out again. Repeat until it works. Betrayal is a process of repetition until suddenly you aren't repeating the expected any more. Snow, Snow, ordinary and everything, lips closing in on the most vulnerable bits of Ravenna's skin and pretending to bite.

But for all Ravenna is wet and lonely and unbreathing, Snow hasn't really clamped down. She wouldn't drop to orgasm if it wasn't for Snow lifting her mouth free entirely, all agleam, and choking out _my queen_.

Ravenna is astonished, then lost.

Snow rests her elbows around Ravenna's hips, her body a canopy and not an aviary's cage. "And now?"

Ravenna works for the strings to Snow's smallclothes, which resist despite the flush below her cheekbones. She shrugs, scrabbles for magic until the dagger whisks into her fingers, and cuts the fabric open instead. If Snow means to endure, these snips will be inconsequential. Her future challengers will not have something unspeakable stopping them from impaling her through the gut. So Ravenna does not slow a second in sliding four fingers into Snow, waiting for Snow to clench, and driving them deeper, and crooking her leg up so it is the rough cap of her knee that rubs against Snow's clit and sets her off. "No," Snow says, but that is instinct as ever, and she comes a storm.

For a minute they nurse themselves in the same alcove. Snow's hand locks onto hers. It is not shy.

"Ah," Ravenna says; you fuck and then you die.

"No, I'll have my men treat you like glass," Snow says. "I have enough heart to sustain me without yours. I know I can exercise mine, and not use it up. But what you've ground into this land will take a long time to undo." She licks her thumb and seems unsurprised it tastes innocuous. "Someday I may be in need of a witch's head."

"Better to execute me now," Ravenna says.

"No." Snow smiles at her, naked and queen nonetheless. "It's your mind I'll need, not its shell, however beautiful it may be."

* * *

**A/N: **All feedback is deeply appreciated!

Originally written for apricity as part of the Yuletide exchange, December 2012, because I am not of such strong stuff as could resist morally compromised queens being conflicted over each other. Many thanks to Katie, Smilla, and King Touchy for betaing; my heart swells in your hands.


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